Republicans voted down a bill Tuesday that would provide Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans, a setback for South Florida lawmakers from both parties.

Democrats needed GOP support for a bill sponsored by Reps. Darren Soto, D-Kissimmee, and Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Miami, after they fast-tracked the measure to force a vote before the House of Representatives leaves for its summer recess at the end of the week. The fast-tracking meant the bill needed two-thirds support instead of a simple majority to pass.

Lake Okeechobee may be a natural feature of the Florida landscape, but politics also come into play when it comes to it.

More than $1 billion of federal support has been spent to help restore the Everglades and fix the plumbing around the lake. That money, along with other money for the Army Corps of Engineers, starts flowing from the House Appropriations Committee.

Venezuela’s humanitarian and human rights crisis is one of the worst South America has ever seen. So a Miami lawmaker helped introduce a bill in Congress Thursday to protect Venezuelans living here from being deported back.

President Donald Trump is signing into law a bill to cut off resources to the government of Nicaragua and provides sanctions against countries that assist the Central American nation.

Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a Miami Republican who co-sponsored the bill, said in a press release that the legislation “supports the Nicaraguan people in their demands for rule of law, human rights and free, fair elections by denying resources to their oppressors.”

One of South Florida’s longest-running political dynasties will remain intact for at least another two years, as eight-term Republican Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart cruised to a convincing defeat over Democrat Mary Barzee Flores, who was making a long-shot attempt at flipping Miami-Dade County’s most conservative Congressional district.

Diaz-Balart, the incumbent representing Florida’s 25th Congressional District, was soundly besting Barzee Flores with — collecting 61 percent of the votes with almost 8 percent of the county’s precincts tallied.

I’m a critic of U.S. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s push to isolate Cuba, which I consider an outdated means of achieving change on the communist island. But I’m an admirer of the Miami Republican in most other regards – especially her fundamental decency.

She reminded me why last year, when she didn’t show up in Little Havana for President Trump’s get-tough-on-Cuba show. Sources close to her tell me she found the Republican president’s “rollback” of U.S.-Cuba relations about as meaningful as one of his late-night tweets. More important, she really didn’t want to be in the same camera frame with Trump – a guy she seems to find as bereft of fundamental decency as most Americans do.

Republicans from Miami-Dade on Monday condemned the Trump administration's decision to separate families crossing the southern border, with adults being sent to detention centers while their children are housed in cages and cry for their parents.

Immigration activists rallied outside Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart’s Miami office on Tuesday morning, asking him to want him to vote “NO” on President Donald Trump’s budget increase for immigration enforcement and asking that those funds are allocated instead for education.

The rally was the culmination of a movement-training program run by the Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM) that brought 70 youth activists from eight states to Miami for the weekend.

As their constituents protested in support of the Affordable Care Act in Miami Wednesday, two South Florida republicans provided crucial votes for a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, which narrowly passed the house 217-213.

U.S. congressman Mario Diaz-Balart, one of the first local Republican congressman to endorse Donald Trump, found himself in an awkward place during a luncheon in Coral Gables, on Tuesday.

Diaz-Balart was the featured speaker at a lunch at the Biltmore hotel sponsored by the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, a non-profit dedicated to promote foreign investment. In front of nearly a hundred foreign business leaders and non-profits, Diaz-Balart spoke about investing overseas - something the president’s administration has not been too keen on.

So it's not such a big surprise that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Miami Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart, also a Republican, appear to have finally slipped under the same campaign sheets.

President Obama’s announcement last week that the U.S. will restore diplomatic relations with communist Cuba on July 20 – and will open an embassy there a few days after – is angering South Florida lawmakers.

Their options to stop the Administration are limited. But they’re moving against Obama’s new engagement policy nonetheless, and it’s shaping up as one of the summer’s big political battles.

The rhetoric from the Cuban-American congressional caucus is rising with the humid temperature in Washington, D.C.

Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi recently brought a handful of Democrats with her to Cuba – a trip she calls a sign of “friendship” between the U.S. and the island nation that remains under a congressionally mandated embargo.